Other cars have "chips" (ECU upgrades) available. Is there a chip for DSMs?

Superchips, Cyntex, Jones Electronic Technologies (JET), GP Performance, and other vendors claim to sell ECU upgrades.  However, few DSMers use them.

Many vendors have offered upgrades which are clearly fraudulent.  Some vendors, such as Superchips and Richie Broden Racing, have been guilty of selling 'ECU upgrades' with manual boost controllers as part of the kit.  In reality, the chips sold with these kits were identical to the stock chips; the performance gains were all by virtue of the MBC.  Other vendors have pulled the same trick without including the MBC, counting on human nature to fool the purchaser into believing there is a significant difference between 'their' chip and the normal chip.

Examination of several DSM and non-DSM ECU 'upgrades' by responsible Digest members have revealed no less than seven (7) fraudulent products.  Needless to say, trust in these vendors has diminished to nonexistence.  Read all about it!

In addition, there are several items that work against ECU upgrades:

• Many DSM ECUs do not have external memories that can be easily swapped out.
• Most vendors do not support non-external-EPROM ECUs; they require much more work.
• ECU upgrades typically assume the car is stock - modified cars may realize zero performance gains, or actually run slower.
• Most vendors do not offer meaningful features, such as fuel cut elimination.
• Zero documented evidence that such upgrades work.
• High cost.

A dead giveaway of inflated performance claims, at least for turbo cars, occurs whenever a vendor claims the ECU upgrade provides an increase in boost pressure.  This is an impossibility on the DSM cars without additional equipment.  Watch for it!

Special disclaimer for non-turbo cars: no DSMer has ever examined the chip upgrades for NT cars in detail, so no opinion on NT ECU upgrades can be drawn from the above information.  However, these are the same vendors which sold the 'upgrades' described above.  Evidence supporting the effectiveness of chip upgrades for any year, make or model of automobile is scarce; of this, little of it is the result of well-designed and well-documented experimentation.

Fortunately, Technomotive has come up with solutions that actually work, and are accurately aimed at the needs and desires of the DSM performance enthusiast.  They also offer the apothesis of all tuning tools: a true DSM datalogger.

XS Engineering also offers legitimate ECU upgrades. Nobody knows how effective they may be, however, and their upgrades are reportedly expensive - about as much as a PMS unit.

The Last Word: Most of the above-mentioned vendors are long since out of this business. TMO used to sell chips, but stopped some years back. Try DSMchips.com, they're the real deal.